Museum recreates family's Victorian canalside home

The cottages stood derelict for years and had to be saved from demolition

A museum has recreated the home of a family of six who lived and worked by the locks of a Nottinghamshire canal in Victorian times.

The Canalside Heritage Centre in Beeston Rylands, housed in two cottages by the Beeston and Nottingham Canal, opens the display on Saturday.

It shows how Martha Rice and her husband and four children lived in the cottages from 1842 - with all six sleeping in one bed.

Trustee Mike Spencer said: "We want people to appreciate not only the history but how extraordinarily hard life was for the people who worked on the canals."

The living conditions of a working family from the 1840s have been recreated

The canals carried raw materials, fuel and finished products, including the textiles which made Nottingham famous.

The cottages oversaw locks where the Beeston and Nottingham Canal was built to take barges away from the River Trent and towards the city.

They were occupied until the 1990s but had to be saved from demolition before being turned into the heritage centre, which opened in 2017.

Furniture, videos and information boards have now been used to reveal the human side of the canal network.

Mr Spencer said: "What we have managed to do is recreate a very traditional canal worker's cottage.

"It is furnished and has sound effects, so when you walk in, you are effectively taken back to the cottage as it was in the mid 19th Century."

Despite now being a quiet location, families on the canal lived hard, busy lives

And while it is a peaceful spot now, Mr Spencer said it was the hub of a relentlessly busy network.

"Nowadays you sit, and every so often something sails by," he said.

"In its day, this place was busy 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it never stopped.

"This was the main transport hub through this part of the country, joining the ports of the west coast with the industrial centre.

"There would have been hundreds of boats servicing the canal, and they were all pulled by horses, so just imagine how many horses there were."